The year draws to a close and the Irish people anticipate that when the Dáil sits again in January, a new government will form. It will mostly be the same as the old one, albeit lacking a strong environmental concern after the electoral wipe-out suffered by the Green party.
The results of the General Election in November seem to indicate that Irish citizens are largely content with how society is progressing. Of course, keener political analysts might argue that the vote of confidence in a Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael coalition is really a vote of no-confidence in the opposition, but such judgements are neither native to the mission of the JCFJ, nor native to our own instincts. We are interested in policy and how it affects people, especially the marginalised. The cut-and-thrust of political drama is not our concern.
And so the election results do concern us, or at least prompt a moment of pause and reflection in our team. The influence of the Green party in the last government was impressive, considering their junior status. Environmental policy, even more than other domains, takes time to take effect and it was only as they were being ushered out the door that the proof of their success arrived with the first real reduction in national carbon emissions since, well, forever. With a fragile enough coalition held up by independents who range from climate apathetic to climate denialist, that progress could well be rolled back. Let us be clear why that matters: those who have contributed the least to the climate collapse we are starting to endure will suffer the most. Adaptation and mitigation is not just some lofty, pious concern for Christians who see God’s grandeur reflected in the natural world. It is a justice issue.
As we look forward to a new government in 2025, it is of course the housing and homelessness crises that worries us deeply. The FF/FG/G coalition was confronted with a real-world example of evidence-based policy during the pandemic when their eviction ban reduced the numbers of people entering homelessness. But as soon as the Covid graphs eased, the ban was lifted. For almost ten years now, the Centre has been repeating that it is imprecise to call this a crisis because a crisis is something you try to avoid. But every informed and honest person looking at the policies that have been pursued will be confronted with the inevitable realisation that skyrocketing rents, rising house values and rampant homelessness would be the consequence. 5,000 children will be homeless on Christmas night. Our economy is booming and that is surely at the heart of the trust that the Irish people have placed in the incumbent leaders. But they simply must break with their ideological commitments and dedicate themselves to remedying this moral scandal in the course of the next government.
Practically everyone can understand why environmental and housing policies should be at the centre of our political imagination. But very few people seriously attend to the third concern that the JCFJ carries into the new year. 2024 has seen a consistent rise in the number of people we have imprisoned and a genuinely shocking level of overcrowding in our prison estate. The reigning parties are promising to be tough on crime, to recruit more Gardaí, to build more prisons. Faced with the obvious failure of the penal system, the best that our current leaders can do is to suggest we redouble our commitment in the area. The fact is that “you do the crime, you should do the time” is childish moral reasoning. The people “doing time” are not fairly distributed across the population. People from certain areas and backgrounds end up in prison while people engaged in quite open criminality from other areas and other backgrounds need not fear the custodial arm of the State. Perhaps our most audacious prayer over Christmas will be that Irish society really wrestle with the reality that Jesus came to set the prisoners free.
But, there are ways to be imprisoned even if you are not living in jail. And the abiding appeal we would make to the politicians who will constitute the next Dáil is to seriously consider the legacy of their policies. So much has been made over the last generation about how we are building a Republic “for people who get up early in the morning“. We know now, after years of experimenting in this direction, who is really getting up early in the morning. It is the cleaners whose shift starts at 5am. It is the bus drivers who keep the public transport system running overnight. And it’s the people so poor as Christmas approaches that they queue up in the cold at 2am to get a relatively small voucher to contribute to their grocery bill. None of these people are enjoying the great spoils that are shared by those at the top of our society. And no society is sustainable where people work relentlessly and still face homelessness. Where young people play by the rules and can’t conceive of starting a family. Where we tell people the most they can hope for is that they get to the front of the queue at the Capuchin Day Centre before the vouchers run out.
This Christmas, we hope that justice and hope might be treasured by the politicians who, in the new year, will make up our new government.
